According to James L. Tanner in one of his classes at the Family History Expo in Sacramento this summer, "The Family Search Wiki is easily to most valuable genealogical resource on the Internet!" That is a pretty bold statement but this man is incredibly knowledgeable about the Wiki and is one of its Arbitrators. It made me sit up and take notice.
You can find it at familysearch.org. On the tool bar on the home page click on Search and you will find it on the tool bar there. Here is the path to it. familysearch>search>wiki The WIKI can be used free of charge as can the entire website familysearch.org. However, you do not even have to register or sign in to use the wiki.
So what is a wiki exactly? According to Mr. Tanner, a Wiki "is a website that allows the creation and linking of a large number of interrelated pages in a collaborative environment where the wiki is constructed." It is maintained by a community of users that allows any authorized user to add or edit content. Sound familiar? Our new Family Tree is a wiki platform program! Every page or article is considered open-ended and never finished.
A wiki website relies on its authorized users to supply content and edit what is there. If you have expertise in a given area of family history or genealogy you should consider adding it to the Family Search Wiki. Wiki articles are about places and methodology. You cannot add information about a person. Nor will you find your ancestors there. But you may add or find something in the locality where they lived that opens up a new vista of research for you or another user. There are instructions for making additions on the website. The wiki community usually has a committee of arbitrators that maintain the integrity of the site by publishing only things that appeal to the users as a whole. This is definitely true of the Family Search Wiki. It must pertain to genealogy and family history or the technology used therein. Obviously off-topic articles are not going to make it through arbitration.
The Research Wiki, as the Family Search WIKI is called, is still young. There is no compensation for adding an article or sharing your knowledge. This is is act of good will on the part of the community. Occasionally controversy will arise, as long as there are people with varying opinions, but the arbitrators watch this closely and research the things when changes become controversial. For the most part it is a very congenial group of users just trying to spread the wealth of information as a way of helping others. It can be as simple as one person's experience with one record that could be very beneficial to other users with the same ancestor, according to James Tanner. Additionally it can be more complex and broader in scope like research techniques in general or in a certain locality as an example.
If you'd like to read a good article on the Research WIKI check this one out. Its contents will surprise you, sadden you and perhaps even enrage you. It will teach you compassion, gratitude for when and where you live and the privileges you have that many in history have not. This article was written by our good friend and our Italian cousin, Stephen K. Ehat. 10 Stars!
All of this information on the Wiki and its background was inspirational to me. I love knowing the hows and whys of how these things come to be. Now if we will all just remember to check it out and search it and learn from it. Adding it to our research toolbox is a great idea. Remember it is about places and methodologies, not individuals. I also learned from the Google image above about it that you can add your organization's upcoming events to it also. It is the first place I will be looking when I have a question! I know I have mentioned this before but James Tanner is a verocious scholar of genealogy, family history and technology. He writes constantly, posting an average of two posts per day on our subject matter on his blog which is:
You can subscribe to his blog just like you can to this one, and have the new posts come straight to your email. You'd be surprised how much you can learn from blogs that will come in handy at some point. The other blog I thoroughly enjoy is The Ancestry Insider found at:
He has done a fabulous job of covering a lot of classes I didn't attend at the BYU Genealogy Conference 2013 which has make my experience there twice as rich. By the way, I will be doing some posts on the classes I did get to attend which were phenomenal. I'll be studying that syllabus for a year. I see it happening in October perhaps, when the leaves are falling, there are some lazy Indian summer days left and things are not as crazy as they are right now. It is definitely on my to do list.
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